Amazon launches Kindle Matchbook: discounted e-books for those who own the hard copy

if you've bought one of 10,000 selected titles from Amazon, you'll be entitled to snag a digital copy for between $2.99 and nothing. The service launches in October and there's no limit on when the purchases were made -- meaning that you could be offered an awkward reminder of the literature you were gorging back in 1995.

This special edition deals with the Groklaw shutdown announced on Tuesday, August 20, 2013. Groklaw is hosted at ibiblio similarly to LISNews and librarian.net. History of the growth of the National Security Agency under both Republican and Democratic Presidents is also discussed.

Amazon versus your public library:
"E-books are becoming more important and we do expect them to grow going forward," said Christopher Platt, director of the joint technology team for the New York and Brooklyn public libraries. "Digital is not a boutique service. It's part of the future of the library."

“Amazon is doing something vitally important for book culture by making books readily available in places they might not otherwise exist,” said Ted Striphas, an associate professor at Indiana University Bloomington. “But culture is best when it is robust and decentralized, not when there is a single authority that controls the bulk of every transaction.”

Among Amazon skeptics, patience for the online retailer’s lack of profits has become a source of bemused agony. No other marquee tech company could get away with, at best, earnings in the low millions (to say nothing of ending last year in the red). Despite such low numbers, Amazon’s shares have enjoyed unprecedented success over the last few months.

But the past few days have seen the onset of what could turn into what the short sellers would see as a major correction. If so, it’s not only shareholders who could suffer. A major stock downturn led by investors no longer willing to wait for Jeff Bezos to work miracles could eventually mean higher prices for Amazon customers.

To understand why, first consider the fortunes of one of Amazon’s main rivals.

Where in the U.S. can you find the the biggest bibliophiles? Online e-tailer Amazon just reached into its mammoth pool of purchasing data to pull out its third annual list of cities in the U.S. where the “most well-read” among us apparently reside.

Anita Demetropoulos, a Maine shopkeeper, figured she would never see the day when her most relentless competitor, Amazon, would be forced to collect sales tax.

Now that Congress seems ready to do that, she is no longer sure it matters. Even in losing, the e-commerce powerhouse is triumphant. It no longer needs the tax break to vanquish its foes — and could even make money by collecting the new taxes for other retailers.

These questions have risen to the fore in an arcane, but hugely important, debate about how to redraw the boundaries of the internet. Brazil and Peru have lodged objections to a bid made by the US e-commerce giant for a prime new piece of cyberspace: ".amazon".

The Seattle-based company has applied for its brand to be a top-level domain name (currently .com), but the South American governments argue this would prevent the use of this internet address for environmental protection, the promotion of indigenous rights and other public interest uses.